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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Apple Might Climb Into Bed With FourSquare To Spice Up Its Maps Life

Given its humiliating climb down last week when Apple reluctantly allowed Google Maps to make its iOS 6 debut, we could be forgiven for thinking that the company had thrown in the towel in the “Maps Wars”. Not so.

While the all the signs were pointing to Apple’s apparent capitulation, senior vice president Eddie Cue has secretly been soliciting support, sounding out an alliance with social network FourSquare in a bid to bolster its own dismal maps app.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Cue recently met up with FourSquare chiefs to discuss a deal that would allow Apple to make use of FourSquare’s vast database of locations and business listings.

There’s no suggestion that Apple is looking to acquire FourSquare; indeed, the company has previously held discussions with map makers including TomTom to see if anyone can help improve its own offering, and so there’s no reason to think their cooperation with FourSquare will be any different.

Apple is in dire need of assistance though, following a tidal wave of negative publicity following the release of Apple Maps back in September. Three months later, and with no major improvement in sight, the application continues to hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons, the latest being when Australian police warned that it was so bad that it could ‘risk users lives’ by directing them into the middle of a desert.

If a deal goes ahead, Apple Maps would clearly benefit from the vast number of business listings that FourSquare possesses, and hopefully the move would also improve the accuracy of its current data. Apple claims to have more than 100 listings of its own, but as we know all too well from experience, making sense of this data can be somewhat troublesome.

But even if FourSquare does help Apple to vastly improve its maps, it faces an uphill struggle to overhaul Google. Since its launch last week, it has already become the mapping solution of choice for millions of iOS devotees, and it’s difficult to see why these would migrate from Google’s near-perfect offering.

One crucial advantage that FourSquare offers is that it’s generally considered to have some of the best location-based technology around, and this could prove tempting to some users if it was made exclusive to iOS.

Let us know what you think about this potential move by Apple in the comments section below.

About Mike Wheatley

Mike Wheatley is a senior staff writer at SiliconANGLE. He loves to write about Big Data and the Internet of Things, and explore how these technologies are evolving and helping businesses to become more agile.
Before joining SiliconANGLE, Mike was an editor at Argophilia Travel News, an occassional contributer to The Epoch Times, and has also dabbled in SEO and social media marketing. He usually bases himself in Bangkok, Thailand, though he can often be found roaming through the jungles or chilling on a beach.
Got a news story or tip? Email Mike@SiliconANGLE.com.